If you recall a speed jump when you moved from something gluttonous and bloated, like Ubuntu, to something sparse and clean, like Arch … well, you’ll see the same improvement when you move to something skeletal and streamlined.

To illustrate the point:

The same system, same hardware, same filesystem, but more than 20 seconds for Arch to start just to the console — and that’s with the network daemon backgrounded so it doesn’t hang while it contacts the router.

Of course, the day-to-day speed improvement comes at the cost of building up a system from scratch (more or less), and like a lot of my Crux systems, this one quickly went southward when I started tweaking it.

Plus, it took me two or three attempts just to get the kernel working, and another one or two to get the graphics system functional.

Personally, I consider that to be a good thing — I’ve learned a lot from Crux, and I can always stand to learn some more. I learn my making mistakes and figuring out how to solve them, or at least circumvent them.

So while I don’t use this much for faster, heavier machines, I still rely on it — sometimes too much — for low-end hardware and extra slow systems.

Because if it can trim Grub-to-X to under 10 seconds at 2.5Ghz, imagine what it can do for 150Mhz. 😈

P.S.: Sorry about the sideways videos. I thought YouTube let you rotate a video after posting it, but it appears that I am wrong. 😐

Another fine article that I enjoyed reading 🙂
Besides the booting time, is there a remarkable performance difference between Arch and Crux after booting?

I’ve been curious regarding Crux lately, probably I’ll install it on my old netbook, even if the performance after boot difference isn’t that great between arch and crux, I’m pretty sure it will be a good educational experience 🙂

Hey,
I found a very old laptop compaq presario M2000
256mb ram and 1.6ghz speed and looking to resurrect it with a linux os which is the best suited linux for it?
the use is pretty minimalistic,nothing big, just music,movies, and some internet surfing.
Thanks ~